10 May
2007
10 May
'07
11:44 a.m.
On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 08:51:22AM -0400, Thomas Vecchione wrote:
And how is it doing to be described is my point. At the moment it is
being described as a function of what internal extensions are there in
the case of something that does beyond the spec. If this was one or two
extensions it wouldn't be bad at all, but since we are aiming for
expandability BEYOND what we can thing of right now I think it is a
large mistake to not plan for what would happen if there are 50
different extensions.
How about waiting a bit what extensions appear at all?
Can't make meaningful plans for profiles or whatever beforehand,
anyway.
Again no. A host could still choose whatever they
support. However,
for example, an audio host might support the audio extensions, a video
host might support the video extensions, and a host that is midi capable
the midi extensions. If you are dealing with 20 or 30 extensions there
for whatever reason, are you honestly going to have an end-user go
through and say, ok this extension is present, this one is present, this
one is not, crap my plugin won't work or will be missing a gui.
For the common user, hosts and plugin collections should be part
of the distribution he uses. Ideally host packages would recommend
plugin collections, but I only know that feature from Debian.
Anyway, the issue of the user having to check what works where
doesn't has to appear in this case.
It might be far easier to list the supporting hosts for each plugin,
once the number of extensions outgrows the number of hosts. It's not
difficult to read a plain list.
Do not get me wrong, as I have said repeatedly thus
far, LV2 is nice and
highly expandable, and I certainly don't want to change that, but that
by itself will not make it usable for the end user. Power and
flexibility do not necessarily equate ease of use, and personally I do
not see a reason why this could not have all three, it is close as it is
and the only thing holding it back are clear definitions of what will
and won't work where for an end user that doesn't require 20 minutes
worth of work for each plugin to see if it SHOULD work. This has much
less to do with the technical requirements of the spec, and much more to
do with looking down the road and realizing that if this spec IS fully
taken advantage of, things might very well get messy.
Please recognise that a new standard needs a phase of experimentation.
You simply can't decide on every possible what-if and nail everything
down, as then nothing is ever pushed out the door.
--
Thorsten Wilms
Thorwil's Design for Free Software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com